Evaluation of the Census 2000 Quality Assurance Philosophy and Approach

• Activity Number: 100
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 12, 2002 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods*
• Author(s): Broderick Oliver*+ and Daniel Levine and David Marker and David Morganstein
• Affiliation(s): U.S. Census Bureau and Westat, Inc. and Westat, Inc. and Westat, Inc.
• Keywords: field operations ; quality assurance ; continuous improvement

Abstract

Census 2000 involved numerous major field operations, and at its peak, more than 500,000 temporary workers. Managing the quality of the deliverables produced by this large, decentralized, and transient workforce was a major challenge for the Census Bureau. Our quality assurance (QA) mission was threefold: (1) to prevent significant performance errors; (2) to promote continuous improvement in worker performance; (3) to identify and correct completed work units that contained significant performance errors.

We attempted to build quality into the system, emphasizing improved training methods, preventive activities, and continuous feedback over inspect-and-repair, which we used primarily to prevent errors from being clustered in specific areas of the country.

As with any major undertaking, our QA efforts met with success and failure. For example, the lack of integration between our production and QA activities was a deficiency, as was poor implementation of some of our QA programs. In this paper, we attempted to identify the major reasons for these and other problems, and learn what organizational structure needs to be in place to avoid similar problems in the next census.